With the popularization of intelligent terminals, reading client (hereinafter “client” for short in the present application) is increasingly applied to intelligent terminals. But so far, its major function part, data storage and slice data processing, is a relative core part with great technical difficulty and needs to be further optimized. This part is also very important in user experience of the client.
Reading data of the client comprises articles, pictures, videos, microblog and the like. In the course of using the client, a most common scene is: a user downloads reading data in a certain time period (e.g. during noon break) by means of the client. Generally, the client can obtain about 20 pieces of reading data and save them in database for displaying. After the user has read for a while, he will exit from the client and continue his own business. And then during another time period (e.g. six o'clock at dusk), the user enters the client again to download new reading data. Generally, considering data traffic, data transmission speed and user experience, the client will not request all reading data from the data downloaded last time (for example, during noon break mentioned before) to the data up to now. In this period, server might already have hundreds of pieces of reading data, thus the client will request only the newest about 20 pieces of reading data for the user. Thus, between the just requested 20 pieces of reading data and the 20 pieces of reading data requested before (e.g. during noon break) by the user there are some reading data that has not been downloaded to the client. The “hollow” part between the newest reading data and the prior reading data is called as “slice data”.
A practice in the prior art is inserting the newly downloaded reading data directly in front of the prior reading data after downloading the new reading data, and displaying all of them, without considering whether or not there is slice data there between. As a result, the user cannot find out whether or not slice data exists between the displayed data, and cannot obtain slice data.